Pensions Bill [HL]

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord McKenzie with regard to this section of the Bill. I have received many letters from various organisations about the Bill—like most people, I expect—and one thing that they all have in common is that they are all very concerned about what they regard as the acceleration of the timetable for women. I have had correspondence from Saga, which tells me that it believes that 2.6 million women will be adversely affected. It points out that the women concerned had not expected such an accelerated timetable. The TUC has also said that it is concerned about the acceleration and its effect upon women. Age UK is taking a similar posture, and so is Which?.

A number of noble Lords who contributed to our Second Reading debate concentrated on what they saw as the unfairness to women in the accelerated timetable. The amendments proposed by my noble friend are an attempt to deal with that, for which I thank him. I hope that the Government will be prepared to take on board that this is a real concern about a Bill that basically many people accept. Practically everyone who has written to me says that they accept the whole idea of auto-involvement—of people being in the pension industry, so to speak, and being pension savers for very often the first time in their lives. It therefore seems a shame that we might get some difficulty and some opposition to a Bill that I basically accept. I accept that we have to have a different age of retirement and so on because of longevity and the various other arguments that have been advanced in favour of the Bill, but on the other hand there is a lot of concern about the accelerated timetable. I hope that the Government can do something to help us in that regard.

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, but I have to say I am very attracted to the halfway position, as it were, of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. The difficulty is, as Machiavelli said, that you should not have a second line of defence—that you should just go straight through—so I am nervous in saying that I like the compromise idea but there is a basic serious unfairness to a very small group of women. We are talking about a one-off event over a period of three to four years, I think it is, and it would be a good idea to address this. If the halfway house makes more sense in overall financial terms, though, I would support that.

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Moved by

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

6: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Revision of increase in pensionable age for men and women
(1) The increase in pensionable age for men and women may be revised in the case of illness or infirmity, or of particularly arduous or dangerous employment.
(2) This revision shall not involve loss of state pension rights.”

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I am attempting to follow on from what I said at Second Reading, when we discussed the Bill in its entirety. I said at that time that there were many people, mostly men, who wanted to work on and who enjoyed the jobs they were doing, and did not object at all to working on. I made the point, however, that not all jobs or all people were the same. There were instances where I thought that there should be provision for some flexibility, and that is what my wording seeks. It may not be particularly marvellous wording and I am not committed to it, but I have some concern about the issues raised by it.

There are numerous people—mostly those who have manual skills but both men and women—who perform work that, if it is not done, we would notice and we would no doubt complain about it. We complain if our hospitals and schools are not properly cleaned and if we cannot get work done on the maintenance of our homes, if we want somebody to do it. These are the sort of people who, generally speaking, do not have a great deal of educational attainment, and whose skills are manual. They often, at the end of their working lives, look forward very much to being able to retire at what was the standard retirement age, but they now find that they are expected to work for longer, and in many cases they do not want to do so. In many cases they feel that enough is enough. They have had enough working time doing the sort of arduous, not particularly interesting and perhaps even back-breaking job that they have been doing, and they want the opportunity to retire. We want to make provision for people like that to be able to retire earlier. Often they have health problems of one sort or another. That is made clear in my amendment, where I say,

“case of illness or infirmity”.

My noble friend Lady Hollis has already drawn attention to the fact that there are many instances of, and much information available about, the ways in which some poorer people at the end of their lives are subject to ill health of one sort or another, and who should therefore not be expected to continue to work in order to acquire entitlement to their state pension, and certainly not when more years are required. That applies equally to women. Again, as I have said, if you have been doing a job cleaning, you may not want to go on and on until you are 66 or whatever. Certainly, although lighter work might be available, they might not be able to do it. I remember talking to a cleaner who said, “I have not got much education. I am not very good at reading or writing. I could not do another sort of job; I can only do this sort of work”. These people are valuable to us. We notice it very much, and do not like it, if they are not there to do the work that we expect in order to keep our lives reasonably comfortable. I therefore think that arrangements should be made for some flexibility in relation to people doing arduous and sometimes dangerous work. We do not want elderly people clambering up ladders in order to do construction work. That is not a good idea, and it might not even be safe for them to do it. We ought to have a degree of flexibility. I am not wedded to this wording, but that is what I am after, and it is worth considering.

[Baroness Drake]

I express my sympathy with the sentiments that concern my noble friend Lady Turner in her amendment. As we can see from the previous debate, the acceleration of the equalisation timetable is disproportionate in its impact on the poorest and on those with disabilities, many of whom will have worked in manually demanding professions. I look to speak to that issue in my Amendment 7. Although I have great sympathy with her concerns, I am not sure whether the state pension age is the right mechanism for recognising the disparity in life experience that people have, and it may take some time to reduce that disparity of experience or outcomes as a result of working life experiences. Certainly, initiatives aimed at improving health generally and reducing the disparities between socioeconomic groups and geographies—because that can be quite distinctive as well—are important, because I have a great deal of sympathy with the point made by my noble friend Lady Hollis, who said that when you look closely at the figures, certainly for lower socioeconomic groups, the healthy life expectancy rate of improvement is not as great. One does not absolutely know how that will evolve over time, which is why it is important that the Government retain initiatives aimed at reducing existing health disparities.

Flexibility in working arrangements is also extremely important because, regarding scrapping the default retirement age—of which I approve—and other stated policies to improve the working position of older people, it is one thing to have a policy but it is quite another challenge to deliver the changes and cultures in working practices at the work face to deliver the flexibility in working arrangements that you need for older people. Certainly, changing employers’ practices and attitudes is important. Those may be more effective mechanisms in reducing that disparity over the long term.

Having said that, if ill health disparity persists between socioeconomic groups, and one does not know how that will evolve—in terms of ill health the early signs are that those disparities could persist—a Government may well want to look at the qualifying age for pension credit to deal with those issues, where it is not possible for someone with ill health to address the disadvantaged-income position that they will be in. The Government should certainly remain open to that, depending on how the figures evolve.

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[Baroness Turner of Camden]

I thank everyone who has contributed to this debate. It has been very useful because, while they did not care very much for my wording or what I was trying to do, they nevertheless acknowledge that there is a problem here and that there are categories of people who need special care regarding retirement in relation to their health and the type of work that they have done all their lives. I am grateful to the people who have raised points. I thank my noble friend Lady Hollis particularly for drawing our attention once again to carers. They are part of the group who has a lot of heavy and demanding work to do, and they need our support.

I also thank the Minister for what he said. He acknowledges that there is a problem but says that there is a different way of handling it. I shall read what he has said with some interest when I get the opportunity. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 6 withdrawn.